The United States administration has offered various mutually inconsistent justifications for its war against Iran, from regime change to pressure from Israel to self-defence for the homeland. Oona Hathaway has already explained in the pages of Verfassungsblog that the war is unequivocally unlawful in international law. The Trump administration has not even tried to defend the war’s legality. We have come to expect some lack of professionalism from a government of television superstars. Nevertheless, the confusing public statements of the US government should not hide from view a deeper logic at work, one which undermines the rule of law everywhere.

The Return of Civilizational Rhetoric

The “National Security Strategy” of last November said that the commitment that earlier American ‘elites’ made towards international institutions undermined “the character of our nation upon which its power, wealth, and decency were built”. The document included a bizarre tirade against Europe. It asserted that Europe’s so-called “economic decline” is in fact “eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure”. It added that the American government wants “Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence”.

These references to culture and “civilization” were unusual in a document of this kind. They were perhaps dismissed by educated people around the world, who saw them as rhetorical flourishes designed to please an extremist domestic audience. Yet these same ideas were further restated as serious policy goals by Secretary of State Marco Rubio in his speech to the Munich Security Conference in February.

Secretary Rubio said that Europe and the United States are bound to one another, “by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.” Rubio elaborated further that this civilization encompasses a full view of life, including the Christian faith as its “inspiration” as well as “the genius of Mozart and Beethoven, of Dante and Shakespeare, of Michelangelo and Da Vinci, of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones”.

But who are the opponents of “Western Civilization”? Here Rubio’s speech became truly alive: everyone. He argued that the West is being “destabilised” by mass migration and claimed that failure to stop migration was “an urgent threat to the fabric of our societies and the survival of our civilization itself”. He concluded that the “West” needs an alliance which will “revitalize an old friendship and renew the greatest civilization in human history”.

It is striking how closely these statements resemble an old religious view which marked the beginning of Western colonialism. In 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued the decree that authorised the conquest of the New World. He wanted the Christian religion to be spread in the new world, so that the “health of souls be cared for and that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith”. Rubio’s speech shares the same logic of “us” and “them”. This is the language of domination. It is animated by the idea that our culture deserves to be dominant since it is “the greatest civilization in human history”.

The Myth of a Self-Contained Civilization

Rubio’s ideology is as radical as it is wrong. European culture was not created in isolation from other cultures. Europe never had the monopoly on universities, scholarship, architecture, music and art. On the contrary. These are universal achievements, created by people at all times and all places, who borrowed from each other freely and endlessly, whenever they had the leisure and resources to do so. Mathematics, medicine, theology, philosophy, literature, painting, music, architecture, and engineering have always been universal pursuits. From Athens to Rome, Fez, Cairo, Baghdad, and Beijing, global places of learning have always been open to each other. We may have different languages and traditions, but we share a single civilization, not many.

This openness is evident in all of the world’s great cities, from New York, Paris and London to Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Singapore. One can quickly see that the idea of progress is the same in all of them. Everywhere you look, education can defeat superstition, a sense of duty can overcome selfishness, and public institutions can build trust, while art is a shared project of understanding. This idea that the world is united in its values and its rationality animates the work of the United Nations and the universality of public international law. Colonialism and the logic of domination are now unlawful. This is a bedrock of modern law.

This used to be the American government’s view – and remains, I believe, the view of the majority of its population. The First Amendment of the US Constitution includes a clause which precisely prohibits the government from “establishing” a religion. Under the Constitution – read correctly, if not historically – there are no “barbarians” and no second-class human beings. It is shocking to see the new American leaders turn their backs on their own tradition.

The Return of a Sectarian Worldview

It is unclear whether the sectarianism of the Munich speech played any part in the decision to go to war, but it certainly makes war easier to contemplate. If you see other people as lying outside your “civilization” and as threats to it, then you will be tempted to think of them as permanent foes.

Rubio said so himself in Munich. He spoke in support of a US and European alliance which should be “ready to defend our people, to safeguard our interests, and to preserve the freedom of action that allows us to shape our own destiny – not one that exists to operate a global welfare state and atone for the purported sins of past generations”.

The mention of a “global welfare state” was striking. It must be Rubio’s direct response to his many critics who said that his decision to dismantle USAID and to remove tens of billions of foreign aid from the world’s poorest was a disastrous decision of great cruelty and unforgivable immorality. Rubio’s response seems to be that the increased suffering among the world’s poorest may not be such a bad thing after all. It will be good for America, he implied, because it will help it preserve its “freedom of action”. If our aim is to rescue the greatest civilization in human history, some loss of life may be necessary.

Exactly the same thinking may be now motivating the war against Iran. If the people of Iran are seen by the Trump administration as adversaries in a global battle of civilizations and as enduring enemies of our “way of life”, then international law will be a fallacy and war inevitable, if not desirable. Peaceful co-existence will be just a temporary modus vivendi. This is what the US “Secretary of War” is reported to have written in a book called, appropriately, “American Crusade”.

We used to dismiss these views as ill-informed and insignificant, the result of ignorance and hatred. Yet, they seem to have, suddenly, become dominant in American political life. We cannot ignore them any longer. If these ancient delusions of civilizational war truly motivate the current American government, then the decision to start this new war may have been something much worse than a tragic miscalculation. It may also be a grave ethical wrong, the manifestation of true contempt for much of the world. If the revival of this hateful ideology goes unnoticed by America’s international allies and stays unchecked by its domestic political opposition, it will most certainly cause further conflicts in the name of cultural ‘dominance’ in the near future, with dire consequences for the international rule of law and for the world.